Our next chapter: Announcing our $66 million Series B round

We have some exciting news to share today — we’ve raised $66 million in our Series B round!

Sequoia Capital led our Series B round, with participation from DFJ and our existing investors. This brings our total funding to $79 million since we started building Front in 2013. We’re also welcoming Sequoia partner Bryan Schreier to the Front Board of Directors. This is a big milestone for our team, so I wanted to take this moment to share my thoughts on Front now, and our plans for the future.

Company momentum

Since our Series A financing in May 2016, we’ve been working hard to improve our product, scale our team, and get the word out about Front. We now have 2,500 businesses of all sizes and industries using shared inboxes in Front to work faster and more collaboratively.

Last year, we launched a lot of features and improvements to enable teams to respond to messages across more channels, faster and more efficiently. We processed 353 million of our customers’ emails and messages, our users sent 7 million comments to their teammates in the app, and more than 8,500 automated workflows were set up in Front inboxes to help them get work done. We helped our customers in 88 countries around the world for a wide range of use cases — from customer support, client services, operations and IT teams to on-demand and distributed workforces. You can read their stories here.

What’s most interesting to us is that these highlights all lead back to one theme: there’s a growing need for better email, collaboration, and efficiency in the workplace.

Our own team grew, too. At the beginning of 2017, we were a team of 22 Fronteers (our nickname for our teammates) in our San Francisco headquarters. We more than doubled our team by the end of the year, ending with a team of 52 focused on helping to make work communication more collaborative for people everywhere.

The next chapter

With this great momentum and new funding, we’re excited to continue bringing a new level of cohesion and productivity to workplaces with Front.

More and more, teams tell us they feel disconnected — that the use of disparate systems within their organizations creates silos and pulls them apart. Instead of introducing another app that creates internal friction and slows down a business, Front is collaborative by default, so there’s no compromise between great customer communication and ideal internal collaboration, even as companies grow.

Teams can bring all their communication channels like email, live chat, social media, SMS, and voice, and more than 40 other business apps like Salesforce and JIRA into a single collaborative platform to manage all their conversations and workflows in Front. This gives teams more visibility and context to move faster and make smarter decisions — for example, they can see every past conversation with a customer, have internal discussions with teammates, and access data in their CRM, without ever leaving their inbox.

Our Series B funding will enable us to continue improving on the work we’ve done, and it will help us achieve our next few goals:

1. Build an even better product

Email is still the primary way businesses get work done. More than 260 billion emails are sent and received every day, and more than 50 percent of those are business emails. That’s why we’re committed to making email a better experience for teams — more open, collaborative, and integrated into your daily workflow and the other tools you use.

We’ll invest in building a faster, more intuitive, and reliable app for desktop, web, and mobile. We’ll also make changes to our API, better documentation, and dev tools to make it easier and more rewarding for the developer community to build integrations for Front.

You can see our projects in flight right now, and what’s next on our public Trello board. We take your input and your votes on the features you want to see in Front seriously — so don’t hold back those ideas. We want to know how we can build the best work communication platform for your team.

2. Scale our global operations

We’re proud to have a great team in San Francisco, who live our company values every day — transparency, collaboration, high standards, low ego, and care. With this funding, we’re thrilled to hire even more people to help us build a great product, ensure our customers are supported and successful, and grow our footprint around the world. Check out all our job openings!

We also opened a new office in Paris this month. This second office location holds a special meaning for us. We started Front in Paris in 2013 before moving our small team to Silicon Valley to enter Y Combinator in 2014.

3. Accelerate our business growth

Front is the first company to create shared inboxes, enabling teams to collaborate on their group emails and other work communications, in a simple email client. Over the past four years, we’ve made a lot of great progress.

Our new board member Bryan Schreier said it best: “Front has flipped email from a pain point to a solution that increases the efficiency, impact and accountability of teams.”

But we have so much more work to do. There are many more teams we’d like to introduce to Front. We want every employee in a company to be using Front as their primary email client. It’s a long road ahead, but we’re excited to dive into this next phase of growth with all of you.